Dear All,
I am in a project where we are expected to develop a general tool (Not to specific clinical area) to measure the quality of services provided by about 400 hospitals offering inpatient care.
Does anyone out there have some experience to share?
Githinji Joseph Ndiang'ui
Standards and Quality Assurance
National Hospital Insurance Fund
Website: http://www.nhif.or.ke
mailto:jgithinji@nhif.or.ke
Dear Ndiang'ui,
For service quality measurement, there is a MEASURE Evaluation developed tool in form of a flow chart. The flow chart is a step-by-step guide, in visual form, of key stages in the preparation and conduct of a health facility assessment (HFA). It has two parts, the first being a short presentation of the actual stages, the people involved in them, any documentation available for more details, and any special considerations. The second part is a narrative description of issues related to each stage, and information to help the reader understand how each stage is connected to the preceding and subsequent stages. It is available at
http://www.cpc.unc.edu/measure/tools/monitoring-evaluation-systems/steps-to-conduct-hfa
Sam Wambugu,
mailto:samuel.wambugu@macrointernational.com
I think it would be wise to meet with some of the resourceful people like those involved in training and some senior persons in the field. Here you can share experiences and be able to come up with a standard document. In case you buy this idea I will be very willing to contribute.
Kind regards
Mary
--
Nakamya Mary Frances
mailto:mnakamya@vetmed.mak.ac.ug
Dear Colleagues
I am happy to cooperate on this ... my contribution would be in the area of how performance metrics need to be structured to be effective. My background is science, maths and engineering ... which was downgraded to economics ... and again to accountancy. I have worked in the area of performance measurement in a variety of industries from heavy engineering, construction to consumer products, fisheries, medical equipment and high tech. I have been a cost accountant, a VP manufacturing, a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) as well doing consulting with the World Bank, the UN and others in the relief and development industry.
Measurement has many universal characteristics ... one of which is that metrics should be relevant to the subject at hand! My work in this area is now emerging as Community Accountancy (CA) ... and projects like this ought to be integrated into CA as sector specific specialized modules. We are already working to make malaria a module of CA in cooperation with IMMC.
Sincerely
Peter
--
Peter Burgess
The Transparency and Accountability Network: Tr-Ac-Net in New York
www.tr-ac-net.org
Community Accountancy
Integrated Malaria Management Consortium (IMMC)
+1 917 432 1191 or +1 212 772 6918
mailto:peterbnyc@gmail.com
Dear Colleagues
Thank you for alerting me to this document.
I would be very interested in getting feedback about this document. I am particularly interested in learning whether my perception of this document is right or wrong ... is shared with others or not.
Sincerely
Peter
--
Peter Burgess
The Transparency and Accountability Network: Tr-Ac-Net in New York
www.tr-ac-net.org
Community Accountancy
Integrated Malaria Management Consortium (IMMC)
+1 917 432 1191 or +1 212 772 6918
mailto:peterbnyc@gmail.com
Dear Colleagues
I wrote a couple of days ago to the list asking for feedback about a flow chart and the approach being proposed ... but failed to specify what I was talking about. Here is the link:
http://www.cpc.unc.edu/measure/tools/monitoring-evaluation-systems/steps-to-conduct-hfa
I specialized in analysis for a very long time ... initially in the professional accountancy arena, then corporate world and after that in all aspects of relief and development. I am always concerned that the analysis tool can be deployed at very low cost ... quickly ... and will give results that are valuable.
I have my views about the flow chart and the methodology ... but I am not sure that I am right. Maybe I am out of touch. It would be great to see a lot of other viewpoints about this tool.
Sincerely
Peter Burgess
--
Peter Burgess
The Transparency and Accountability Network: Tr-Ac-Net in New York
www.tr-ac-net.org
Community Accountancy
Integrated Malaria Management Consortium (IMMC)
917 432 1191 or 212 772 6918
mailto:peterbnyc@gmail.com
To respond to Peter Burgess' request for comments on the Health Facility Assessment (HFA) Flowchart, I had a quick look at it and found it rather hard to really see its full value as a stand-alone document. Firstly, the user of this tool is assumed to know what an HFA is all about � what are we trying to accomplish with the assessment? It really should be presented as an Annex to a document that explains the value of an HFA so that the user can fit the different steps into their broader context.
Secondly, the Flowchart does not address quality as such. It is almost a generic tool for conducting just about any assessment you may want to do. If the user wants to use this for a quality assessment survey, they still need to develop specific tools (questionnaires etc) for that purpose.
Lastly, given the apparent level of effort that the tool seems to suggest, I would add that if users want to examine quality of health care, they would get greater value out of the exercise if they also collected and analyzed facility expenditures, and also assigned a "quality score" to each hospital. This would help to begin examining questions of efficiency in health care delivery at facility level and hence resource needs for health facilities given their size, location and use. Examining cost and quality relationships among similar hospitals can be quite an eye opener!
Regards,
Steve
--
Stephen N Musau
Abt Associates Inc
Health Systems Strengthening Advisor
AED/Africa Health 2010 Project
1875 Connecticut Av, NW
Washington DC, 20009
Tel. 1 202 884 8906
http://africahealth2010.aed.org/
mailto:smusau@aed.org